He uses phrases like: "Electronic/Multimedia/Shamanism"
and Akashic Record and they
are cool names if you know what they mean or can get past them.
He is not a "Beat" and resents association with the
Beats though he has been called "post-beat" which is
important for our knowledge. But I see him as being in the heart
and belly of the 60's doing the real work--camera, pen, dope,
exploration of mysticism, a multi-faceted phenomenological mystic
with real visionary powers. And I want to open people up to him.
Bring them through a friendly door and then let them descend
into Ira's world without knowing it is happening, and then finally
find themselves in this mystic paradise of life and death, his
"revolving door". And then ask themselves "how
in the world could I have not known Ira Cohen?" Or have
not known how key he is and was to the understanding of the old
and the new, the hallucinatory mind-expanding layers of reality
that frighten and amuse us, the panorama of the traveling circus
of all physical and non-physical things. Cohen is a true and
unquestionable original innovator, friend of Gysin, Burroughs,
Bowles, and Charles Henri Ford, the absolute geniuses of transformation,
transmigration, and the cosmic joke. And then when the audience
walks away they will say, where is that monument to Ira Cohen,
the one we built for Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for Burroughs and
Valery, for Genet and Gertrude Stein. Ira Cohen must be made
accessible! But he has made it absolutely impossible to penetrate
the organic construct of his spirit, without running the risk
that you will sell him out in the process--or maybe not. Maybe
something gentle to begin with, a pale lavender, a dash of blue
and fluff of white, then the slow spinning of Gods and Gurus
and Shamans and Mythologies, the painted faces, deformed limbs,
the broken erections, the flaming corpse of his dearest friend
Angus MacLise and then settling everyone down to say: Hey, it's
alright. There is life, laughter, love and humanity in these
strange visions, no need to come down from your trip, be cool
with it, it is the inside of a beetle's shell, life in a termite
nest, air rushing through the lungs and jaws of a lion, a hoot!

- Michael Rothenberg

Akashic
from the Sanskrit AKASH: Towards the shining (manifestation),
etheric, sky speech, the hidden meaning of the hidden meaning,
the Psychic Keep, the unwritten history of humankind--past, present
& future, God's Book of Remembrance, the Universal Radio,
the Subliminal Cassette, the Cloud Doctrine, Diaries of the radar
etc.

The
Akashic Records are nothing less than human thought preserved
as are radio waves in ether. An Adept or receiver sufficiently
tuned to these vibrations would then theoretically be able to
read these records, even listening in to past or future thoughts
or conversations. From Poetry to Prophecy. From light -- Clairvoyance!"
- Ira Cohen